JANUARY 17, 2007 -- Cox Communications (search for Cox Communications), a multi-service broadband communications and entertainment company with more than six million total residential and commercial customers, has deployed Ciena Corp.'s (search for Ciena) CoreDirector Multiservice Optical Switches in the super headend of its San Diego network to interconnect two metro rings, each transporting multiple 10-Gbit/sec circuits over DWDM.
To interconnect the rings, Cox faced the cost and complexity of purchasing multiple switching and cross-connect products, as well as an expansion of its super headend building to accommodate the new equipment. Instead, Cox says Ciena's CoreDirector has enabled it to remove several bays of legacy cross-connect equipment and associated patch cables, eliminated the need to expand the building, and reduced power consumption.
According to Ciena representatives, CoreDirector also gives Cox 640 Gbits/sec of switching capacity in a single bay to keep pace with growing demand for triple-play and commercial services, while maximizing interfaces for revenue generation based on the platform's internal ring interconnection.
"Our growing capacity requirements made the ring interconnection a natural decision point for our core metro infrastructure," explains David Vaughn, engineering manager for Cox San Diego. "After evaluating the options, CoreDirector clearly delivered the best solution from all perspectives--cost, functionality, performance, and operational simplicity," he says. "More importantly, CoreDirector provides SONET and Ethernet services flexibility and intelligent automation for load balancing, provisioning and cross-connecting traffic between the two rings."
A key element of Ciena's FlexSelect Architecture, CoreDirector is a multiservice, multiprotocol optical switching system that consolidates the functionality of a multiservice provisioning platform (MSPP), digital cross-connect, and Ethernet switch into a single, high-capacity intelligent switching system that can reduce network operator capex by as much as 65% and opex by as much as 85%, claims Ciena. The embedded intelligence of CoreDirector's FlexSelect OS standards-based optical control plane provides 99.9999 percent reliability and real-time resource inventory discovery, database synchronization, intelligent mapping of service requests to network resources, and fully automated activation and deactivation of network resources, says the company.
"Cox was the first MSO to deploy CoreDirector, which not only underscores the growing applications for optical switching outside of traditional markets, but also further highlights the cable industry's increasing focus on intelligent, ultra-reliable platforms with software-based automation," notes Mike Aquino, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Ciena. "With this deployment, CoreDirector joins Ciena's CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform and other optical Ethernet platforms with integrated management by Ciena's ON-Center Network and Service Management Suite in several Cox regions supporting a variety of residential and commercial services," he adds.
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